


Dignity And Above All

by CloudDreamer



Series: Prince With A Thousand Enemies [1]
Category: Dr Carmilla (Musician), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Anxiety, Aurora is a Good Friend, But Mostly Hurt, Cloning Angst, Dehumanization, Derealization, Dr Carmilla's A+ Parenting, Hurt/Comfort, Mortality, Not RPF, Panic Attack in a Bathroom, Panic Attacks, Self-Harm, The Existential Horror Of Dr Carmilla's Clones, The Mechanisms Are Actually Kinda Scary, Weird Memory, inspired by ominous shit actual maki dropped in the mechsdiscord
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24062365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: Maki Yamazaki 000944 is (not) more than a reflection.Title from Watership Down.
Relationships: Dr Carmilla & Clone Maki Yamazaki, The Aurora (The Mechanisms) & Clone Maki Yamazaki
Series: Prince With A Thousand Enemies [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1881310
Comments: 9
Kudos: 21
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	Dignity And Above All

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't about Maki the Person And Actual Creator Of Dr. Carmilla, this is about the in universe Maki(s) that is/are defective(?) clones of Dr Carmilla. Really, it's not RPF. Really.

Maki stands in the bathroom, looking into the mirror and not recognizing herself. That’s not entirely true. She recognizes every single feature. Short black hair sticks up from the scalp, and she runs hands through it, trying to comb it into shape. She pulls too hard, even though the hands seems so weak in comparison to what she’s almost used to, and she’s holding strands of hair. She can bleed, it appears, and she can hurt. She opens her mouth to say, “ow,” but she ends up laughing weakly instead. 

She opens the mouth and feels the shape of the lips with the tongue. They’re soft, and she remembers the touch of someone else on them, but those memories are distant. They’re like a ghost, possessing the shape of her and drawing her in. There’s emotions attached to the words _kiss_ and _love_ , but they aren’t hers. The loss that threatens to push her to the ground is entirely physical, and she’s almost convinced this heart has failed her already at how sharp the pain is. 

Not hers. She has to remind herself, none of these feelings are hers. She is something else. Someone else. She’s her own… person. Is she a person? She knows many things, has stores of memories she can almost access, but they’re not entirely hers. Not hers at all. All the numbers, all the science, it’s cold. She knows why she is, but she doesn’t know what that means. 

Maki turns on the tap, automatically turning up the cold as high as it can go, but when she runs her fingers beneath the water, she steps back. Swears a little bit. This shouldn’t be new to her; she knows she’s done it a thousand times. But that wasn’t her, wasn’t Maki, and there’s no fire in her chest. She’s as human as can be, teeth not curved to a razor point, two eyes, blood in veins, and that means she’s sensitive to the cold. It’s a logical progression of facts, as easy as the alphabet, but she didn’t stop to think, so used to not needing to. 

She tries again, just to prove she can, and she bites down on the lower lip lip as the body adjusts. Her bite hurts, somewhere between ‘not as much as it should’ and ‘much more than it should.’ She can’t seem to make herself bleed this way, even though she knows the pressure of teeth against lip should split it right open with the certainty of someone who’s done it a million times before, on purpose and on accident. 

She can’t do it. She turns up the heat, probably too high, and puts hands back, letting the warmth grow until it starts to burn, and she swears again. It takes trial and error to find a temperature that doesn’t burn or freeze, too much trial and error for something so simple. Blood floods the cheeks— her cheeks— and she places her wet palms against her face. Hers. She swears, it’s hers. Maki is her own person, she has her own body, and this is her body. 

It feels good, the gentle heat, but she’s not sure what to do next. She looks at the towels by the side of the sink. They’re covered in blood, mostly red, but some of it is mercury, and she knows that’s not safe for her. Everything around here is so dangerous for someone like her. She remembers all the hazards like they’re post it notes on a computer screen, easy to forget about and probably out of date. To the Doctor and the Mechanisms, they’re a matter of temporary inconvenience, but to Maki, they’re a matter of life and death. 

She keeps forgetting to breathe. She’s surprised to see the chest rise and fall, and she presses her hands, still wet, against the too-big t-shirt she found lying around. There’s a heart beat beneath it, and she doesn’t know why that’s so scary. In all the memories, she’s the one holding hearts, not the one whose heart is torn out. She’s the one sticking pins and needles into flesh, not… not the one on the slab. 

The body is shaking now. She can tell, because she looks in the mirror, and she sees the hands are trembling. Her vision is too big to fit her, too much in the sides, too much depth perception. For millions of years— no, that wasn’t her. That wasn’t her. That was the Doctor, the Doctor whose memories are black and white and red and sharp. They dig into Maki’s skull like shards of glass, trying to fit an improper vessel. 

She pulls the hand away from the chest. Feels the cold of Aurora’s breath, lets the air dry her instead. She touches her face again, with dry hands, and covers one eye. The wrong eye. It’s disorientating. The whole world is twisted, familiar in its lack of depth but _wrong_. Wrong side of her face, wrong side of the world shown, it’s not better— 

She pulls the hand away, desperately squeezing shut that eye that shouldn’t be there, and everything falls back into place. This is the world as the Doctor would see it, and it feels right in a way that makes Maki want to throw up. She’s _not_ the Doctor, she’s not. She can’t be. She shuts them both, and she realizes the hands are clutching at her head. If she was as strong as her memories suggest she should be, her head would be gone. Crushed by the pressure. It’s not, though, because she’s not the Doctor. She’s not that strong. 

Her hands are clean. She hasn’t done anything. She wasn’t the one who cut those kids open, who stole their ability to die with a scalpel and a kiss on the forehead. There’s no hunger in her chest, no need for nourishment through violence, and she won’t hurt people. She can’t. She’s powerless, and that’s good.She is on the ground, she realizes, with faint traces of blood on the hands, but that’s her blood. It belongs to her, she has the right to take it, and she’s breathing, but she’s breathing wrong. Shakily. Are her eyes open or are they closed? 

She knows what guts feel like, torn out of someone else’s body, knows it more than she knows the kiss of a lover, but she knows both, even though she shouldn’t know either. She laughs, and her laugh is wrong. It’s not hers. None of this is hers. She is a reflection in the mirror. She will always be a reflection in the mirror, will never be her own person, because she is the Doctor but wrong, the Doctor but powerless, the Doctor but afraid. She didn’t chose any of this. She didn’t chose to be made. Her vision is blurry. She’s… crying? She didn’t know she could do that. She doesn’t know anything. The world is so big, and she’s just crying in Aurora’s bathroom. 

She’s seen the stars and the planets and wonders nobody back on Terra would’ve ever believed, if she hadn’t killed them all, and the only thing she’s ever seen is the white of the Doctor’s lab, the hallways of Aurora, and here, this little bathroom. It’s so tight, so cramped, she can barely breathe, but she doesn’t know how to breathe anyway, the Doctor forgot long ago, and she can’t know anything— she doesn’t know anything, she’s nothing. She’s just…  
Just a reflection. 

This body is fully grown, but it’s clean of scars she knows should be there. Each bit of pain, each scream, is something entirely new, something she’s never known but old and familiar too. She’s drowning inside memories that don’t belong to her, and as she reaches desperately for a hand that isn’t coming, a sickening certainty rises in her chest. 

She’s alone. Her Mechanisms— _the Doctor’s_ Mechanisms — hate her, will hate her, for the face she wears, for the memories she holds and the mannerisms she can’t escape. Aurora belongs to the Doctor, is chained by programming Maki doesn’t understand and can’t control. She’s fragile, her life will be as short as a butterfly’s to them, why should they care? 

Or worse, she realizes. Worse than not caring. If they can’t hurt the Doctor, not really, not seriously, she’s close enough. She’s got the same face, same voice. She knows what the Doctor’s done to them, remembers it like it was her cutting them open. 

She looks to the door. She locked it, right? Anastasia— _Nastya_ — wouldn’t break through, but there are vents and secret passages, and Aurora could open it for her, and Jonny wouldn’t hesitate. The sharp terror forces her back into her body, but it’s not a relief. It’s just a new type of fear. 

“Aurora?” Maki asks. The first full words she manages, and they’re shaky. She hates the sound immediately. All the worst parts of the Doctor’s but without the same reckless violent confidence that she makes sound so easy. A screen built into a bathroom wall flashes to life, and Maki can’t keep from screaming just a bit in surprise. At least the scream feels like her own. Feels, anyway, because if she thinks about it, hundreds of memories of the Doctor’s voice ragged with pain run through her mind, and she knows they’re the same. Exactly the same. 

_I’m here._

“I…” She doesn’t know where to begin. Beg? She remembers begging, remembers a stubborn conviction that it’s useless, that if nobody ever listened to her cries for mercy, then she’ll never listen to anyone else. 

“Oh god, I’m fucked,” she says. As far as first full sentences go, it’s not exactly inspiring. Not exactly the stuff of legends. “I’m really fucked.” 

_You’re not in the best position,_ Aurora agrees. 

“What are you going to do?” she asks. She scoots away from the screen as best as she can, pulling herself into as small a form as she can on the ground, even though she knows it’s useless. Aurora isn’t the screen. She’s everything here. She’s the ground Maki is sitting on, the cabinets full of pipes she’s pushing herself against. She’s the air Maki’s breathing. 

_Love my girlfriend. Fight a war or two. Fly._

“What are you going to do with me?” Maki clarifies. The trembles she noticed before are now full body earthquakes. She can’t get any smaller. There’s no where to go. They’re in space. She can’t run. The Doctor would find her anywhere she went, she knows that with certainty. 

_You’re afraid._

Maki nods. 

_I don’t hold you accountable for her actions, if that’s what you’re afraid of._

“I remember it,” she whispers, and then she repeats herself louder. Like Aurora can’t hear everything. Like she can’t tell how fast Maki’s heart is beating, trapped inside her rib cage as it is. She wants to throw up, but there’s nothing in her stomach. “I hurt them. I hurt you. That was me, it was my hands, I held the knife.” 

_Would you chose to hurt me again?_

“No! I don’t want to— I mean, I must’ve then— I did want to, but— I don’t want to. God, she likes it. She says she doesn’t, but she does, she really does like it, I felt it— I feel it—” 

_You don’t._

“I’m— of course not, I’d never. But I’m her? We’re the same.” 

_We don’t chose the circumstances of our birth. All we can do is chose our actions from that point onwards, as best as we can. You are your own person, Maki Yamazaki._

She rubs the tears out of her eyes to better read the digital words, and a knot in her chest starts to unravel. Her grip on her knees slackens. 

“There’s so much more of her than there is of me.”

 _But you’re not alone._

“She’s only half of why I’m scared. What if they want to hurt me to get to her?” 

_I won’t let that happen._

Maki takes a breath, and it tastes sweet, somehow. She instinctively looks up and down, trying to reassess Aurora, but she can’t pick up any more data. Not all of the Doctor's memories are monstrous or tragic. Sometimes they’re the little things. There’s one image she doesn’t understand, one that’s very old indeed, but one that springs to mind in response to Aurora’s reassuring words. 

A small child climbing through a junkyard, bits of metal digging into their skin, and staring at two moons above, shining bright despite the clouds of pollution covering the sky. As much as things change for them, they know those lights will always be there. Somehow, it feels like home. 

She still feels like home. 

“I don’t deserve this,” she says, and she’s not sure whether she means Aurora’s comfort or the pain that’s soon to follow, once Doctor Carmilla decides to find her again. 

_You deserve better,_ Aurora agrees. _We all do._


End file.
